BayCare Health System
BayCare Health System Achieves Breakthroughs in User Access and Productivity by Using
Inventu Flynet Viewer to Unify Data Access Across Multiple Hospitals.
In their pursuit of a solution to integrate widespread mainframe data, BayCare, a community-based, not-for-profit health care system in the Tampa Bay area, considered many approaches. Along the way, they discovered Inventu's Flynet Viewer, and found it to be the critical set of tools their development team needed to achieve integration breakthroughs.
"BayCare is on a constant quest to improve the patient experience, ensure quality, and optimize the productivity and satisfaction of administrators and caregivers alike. Among the challenges facing our IS development team is to provide rapid, transparent access to data across the system of nine hospitals and their respective array of mainframes, databases, proprietary applications and home-grown solutions" states Sam Adams, Managerm Application Development at BayCare. "Flynet Viewer allows us to flow diverse mainframe and "green screen" data to a single-source GUI that meets the needs of our physicians, clinical staff and admissions users. In the past, users had to log into and query multiple, disparate systems resulting in tedious work and data synchronization problems. The unified system saves huge amounts of time that was once spent logging in to various systems and searching numerous screens," observes Adams.
Major goals of the project include unified access to billing, insurance, admission, registration, EMR system data, imaging and a secure online portal that allows physicians to view and sign off on medical records remotely. Another outcome is an all-in-one report called an "Integrated Face Sheet" which combines all non-clinical data into a single view. According to Todd Chapman, Enterprise Application Architect, Flynet Viewer was key to managing the complexity of the project and creating a seamless flow of data. "To bring all this data together into a unified interface, we need to view lab results, allergies, medications, summaries and forms with data pulled from many systems. Much of this data is tracked on mainframes with limited databases, operating through proprietary features and making query difficult. Our developers faced deep challenges in extracting data from various legacy applications and their data schemes, most of which have poor integration capabilities. Sign-offs inside EMR applications also presented barriers because they are proprietary procedures. In addition, while the older systems are reliable workhorses and relatively good at showing events in real time, they can exhibit poor query responses. Flynet Viewer is an essential resource in our efforts to overcome all of these challenges. It has really accelerated our ability to develop a common interface to launch applications, view all patient data and imaging, place orders for patient care, sign-off and authorize actions, and modify information," says Chapman.
The BayCare team chose a strategy grounded in MS Visual studio and .NET, rather than Java or C development. After an extensive search for the best tools, Todd Chapman concluded that Flynet Viewer gave them what other products lacked. "All of our new development is in BizTalk, Commerce Server and SharePoint. We looked at HATS from IBM, but it uses Java and you are tied to Eclipse and the toolsets were not for us; no Java, no Websphere. We also looked at HIS server, but found it really did not have the functions we needed. Transactional was difficult to apply and applications vendors did not support integration. Plus, we were disappointed in the session integration in HIS. It offered no IDE features, and we quickly discovered that we would have been forced to write a lot of stuff that is already included in Flynet Viewer" said Chapman.
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